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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9517540" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Obviously I don't have enough context to really discuss this, but my intuition is that I would find the resource management puzzle I usually see described in Torchbearer more compelling outside of a TTRPG context, and frankly it's the sort of situation I'd rather not handle with dice-rolling; I don't care for tactics video-games that prominently feature miss chances, for example. The last thing a game about making consistent trade-offs needs is resolution level randomness; If you don't want it to be deterministic, better to shift that back to resource allocation or opposition in the first place*.Jumping back to the earlier point about a degenerating board state; I have gotten a general sense, whenever discussion of Story Now games and the concept of "challenge" intersect, that's all but guaranteed to be the resulting nature of the game. The focus on "conflict-charged situations" you mention above means that the gameplay loop tends to center on managing increasing penalties and trade-offs between different resource pools. That's not unheard of in other kinds of games, but it's nearly always paired with a strict time system: do the thing within X turns, and it doesn't matter what state you drag yourself across the finish line in, because the game ends at the point of victory evaluation. A good example would be Ghost Stories (or the reimplementation as Last Bastion), a game that really should be understood as a solo game, but pretends to be cooperative by dividing the pawns between players.I don't mind that so much in board game form, but I think there's only about an hour of enjoyment before that's just not a lot of fun; I suspect I lack the thematic engagement that's bridging that gap for other players. I'm much more interested in say, the gameplay loop in something like Slay the Spire; fixed challenges and semi-randomized resources that need to be strung together into a strategy both for right now, and for the different, increasingly difficulty challenges coming later. The roleplaying part of the game, ideally, serves as the mechanism to pick those challenges.The thing that drives me bonkers is when everyone nods and says "oh you mean dungeoncrawling" which is just a wild lack of ambition. There's no reason, given sufficiently broad interaction rules, that most anything can be conceived of by a player as a challenge to overcome, and a strategy assembled to do so. To go even further back to the thread's premise, the problem is that you can't use unwritten rules to overcome challenges. You actually have to write them all down, and then not change them, or you aren't really doing game, you're doing design or maybe storytelling.*Something of a minority position, to be fair. I'm the only person I know who is sufficiently turned off by the dice-chucking involved to not really want to play Undaunted, for example.</blockquote>

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